Barry Parker (1867-1944) was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. In partnership with Raymond Unwin he planned the world's first 'Garden City', at Letchworth, and London's Hampstead Garden Suburb. They also designed many individual houses and other buildings. In 1910 Parker began publication of a series of essays called 'Modern Country Homes in England' in The Craftsman, an influential American journal. It was his hope that these would be eventually collected together in book form, and would thus stand as a statement of his architectural beliefs. This volume, first published in 1986, is based upon these essays, and offers a critical evaluation of Parker's work. Many of the illustrations are taken from original drawings and photographs.

Documents the projects of The Scarcity and Creativity Studio and shows how this work has developed a unique methodology for practicing and teaching architecture Aimed at students, teachers and professionals who are exploring the possibilities of design-build, the 16 built projects are fully documented in text, drawings and photos Projects are based in Norway, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, China, Argentina and Lebanon.

Architecture, as a discipline and a profession, is facing several crises, which, as yet, it has by no means successfully overcome. The basic hypothesis of the Cosmowomen project is that fully incorporating women into the professional and academic field of architecture would generate new places for thought and attention on the part of professionals or consolidate and expand those that exist, while also intensifying the relationships between those ‘places of thought’, producing a kind of constellation. The exhibition incorporates the work of 65 women architects who have taken the master’s degree programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture in the past ten years, showing a total of 71 projects and including 283 images. The architects are of more than 20 different nationalities and have been tutored by 22 tutors, 50% of them women, who also come from a wide variety of backgrounds in cultural terms and professional experience. The exhibition catalogue includes texts by 20 women architects or professionals in related fields, all with outstanding academic records. Architects: Ana Alonso, Anna Andronova, Christia Angelidou, Felicity Barbur, Justine Bell, Paddi Alice Benson, Christine Bjerke, Romina Canna, Emma Louise Carter, Nicola Chan, Doville Ciapaite, Freya Cobbin, Charlotte Cole, Emma Colthurst, Malina Dabrowska, Naomi De Barr, Emily Doll, Sarah Earney, Sara Firth, Karen A. Frank, Maria Auxiliadora Galvez, Masha Gerzon, Naomi Gibson, Cristina Goberna Pesudo, Faye Greenwood, Lola Haines, Penelope Haralambidou, Bijou Harding, Alice Hardy, Janis Ho, Helena Howard, Sarah Izod, Niki-Marie Jansson, Johanna Just, Gintare Kapociute, Minghui Ke, Fanny Kostorou, Le (Lulu) Li, Ifigeneia Liangi, Ting Jui (Brook) Lin, Marjut Lisco, Shi Yin Ling, Emily Martin, Sara Martinez Zamora, Lauren McNicoll, Heba Mohsen, Alex Mok, Ness Lafoy, Hoy Lei (Kerri) Ngan, Charlotte Page, Jiao Peng, Barbara Penner, Sylwia Poltorak, Sophia Psarra, Katherine Ramchand, Ellie Sampson, Julia Schuetz, Katt Scoot, Maïté Seimetz, Tania Sengupta, Rose Shaw, Faustyna Smolilo, Elin Soderberg, Catrina Stewart, Paula Strunden, Yan Ting (Lorraine), Stefania Tsigkouni, Yinghao Wang, Angeline Wee, Izabela Wieckzorek, Kate Woodcock Fowles, Feng Yang, Siyuan (Amy) Yao, Venessa Yau, See (Phyllis) Yu, Mika Zacarias. Text in English and Italian.

Reflecting the historic first European seismic code, this professional book focuses on seismic design, assessment and retrofitting of concrete buildings, with thorough reference to, and application of, EN-Eurocode 8. Following the publication of EN-Eurocode 8 in 2004-05, 30 countries are now introducing this European standard for seismic design, for application in parallel with existing national standards (till March 2010) and exclusively after that. Eurocode 8 is also expected to influence standards in countries outside Europe, or at the least, to be applied there for important facilities. Owing to the increasing awareness of the threat posed by existing buildings substandard and deficient buildings and the lack of national or international standards for assessment and retrofitting, its impact in that field is expected to be major.

Written by the lead person in the development of the EN-Eurocode 8, the present handbook explains the principles and rationale of seismic design according to modern codes and provides thorough guidance for the conceptual seismic design of concrete buildings and their foundations. It examines the experimental behaviour of concrete members under cyclic loading and modelling for design and analysis purposes; it develops the essentials of linear or nonlinear seismic analysis for the purposes of design, assessment and retrofitting (especially using Eurocode 8); and gives detailed guidance for modelling concrete buildings at the member and at the system level. Moreover, readers gain access to overviews of provisions of Eurocode 8, plus an understanding for them on the basis of the simple models of the element behaviour presented in the book.

Also examined are the modern trends in performance- and displacement-based seismic assessment of existing buildings, comparing the relevant provisions of Eurocode 8 with those of new US prestandards, and details of the most common and popular seismic retrofitting techniques for concrete buildings and guidance for retrofitting strategies at the system level. Comprehensive walk-through examples of detailed design elucidate the application of Eurocode 8 to common situations in practical design. Examples and case studies of seismic assessment and retrofitting of a few real buildings are also presented.

From the reviews
"This is a massive book that has no equal in the published literature, as far as the reviewer knows. It is dense and comprehensive and leaves nothing to chance. It is certainly taxing on the reader and the potential user, but without it, use of Eurocode 8 will be that much more difficult. In short, this is a must-read book for researchers and practitioners in Europe, and of use to readers outside of Europe too. This book will remain an indispensable backup to Eurocode 8 and its existing Designers Guide to EN 1998-1 and EN 1998-5 (published in 2005), for many years to come. Congratulations to the author for a very well planned scope and contents, and for a flawless execution of the plan." AMR S. ELNASHAI

"The book is an impressive source of information to understand the response of reinforced concrete buildings under seismic loads with the ultimate goal of presenting and explaining the state of the art of seismic design. Underlying the contents of the book is the in-depth knowledge of the author in this field and in particular his extremely important contribution to the development of the European Design Standard EN 1998 - Eurocode 8: Design of structures for earthquake resistance. However, although Eurocode 8 is at the core of the book, many comparisons are made to other design practices, namely from the US and from Japan, thus enriching the contents and interest of the book." EDUARDO C. CARVALHO"

The garden design firm of SMI Landscape Architecture is known for its estate masterplanning, its public gardens and streetscapes, and its thoughtful private gardens for clients across the United States, particularly in Florida, and in the Bahamas. The firm's philosophy incorporates a `botanic garden' approach with exotic planting and elements of classical European design to create beautiful, usable spaces, and it is also known for its preservation and restoration of old landscapes. This book presents 15 new gardens, never before published in any book, that show the range of the firm's work. Each client has different requirements, and so each garden turns out differently - but each shows the firm's hallmarks of lush planting, luxurious garden `rooms' and immaculate hardscaping. As Jorge Sánchez puts it in the Preface, `This book shows how not one individual but many make a firm successful.' For each garden, practical information about the design approach and details of the planting are combined with an account of the process, the firm's relationship with the client and the reasons for the design decisions. Through the narrative - often personal, always descriptive, always detailed - a picture builds up of the approach to each set of circumstances. Many of the projects are in Palm Beach, where a boom in the building of new houses and their attached estates in the early twentieth century has left a legacy of stunning - if sometimes neglected - homes and landscapes ripe for restoration. Local architects such as Addison Mizner and Maurice Fatio designed houses that are now being rejuvenated and sympathetically modernized to fit the requirements of twenty-first-century families, and firms such as SMI are at the forefront of the re-creation of their gardens. The Weisfisch Garden in Palm Beach, for example, was carefully restored and given the surroundings its architecture and its owners deserved, and the whole project was recognized with a prestigious award from the Palm Beach Preservation Foundation. The firm of SMI also works in temperate planting zones, and projects in more northerly states provide an opportunity to work with an entirely different palette of plants. For the Plumb Garden in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, for example, the firm was commissioned to remodel a small estate attached to an old pleasure house. The landscape here is much wilder and more temperate than in Florida, and the firm's job was to work with the natural flora and contours of the land while quietly intervening to personalize the areas nearest the house. Simple manipulations of form and slope along with water features and some much more intimate spaces have created a garden that fits impeccably into its wider context and yet is capable of being used and enjoyed by the family. Throughout the book there is a strong sense of participation - with the climate, with the local flora, with the clients and with other designers, whether architects, artisans or interior designers. To be part of such collaborative efforts is hugely satisfying for Sánchez and the members of his team, Claudia Visconti, John Lubischer and Brian Vertesch, as well as producing the best possible result for each set of clients. This beautiful book will appeal to garden lovers everywhere, as well as to design aficionados seeking a deeper understanding of the creative process behind making a garden. It will also appeal to garden designers and horticultural students.

In 2011, Zurich-based architect Fawad Kazi, together with the KSSG-OKS planning consortium, won the competition for the rebuilding and extension of St Gallen's cantonal hospital (KSSG) and the new regional children's hospital for eastern Switzerland (OKS). By 2028, this huge undertaking will have transformed the whole area they are built in. This building monograph, laid out in five elegant volumes, documents in much detail the ambitious project, which is a significant trailblazer in the area of hospital design and urban development. This second volume is devoted to KSSG's Haus 10, situated at the northern end of the site. Connected to the hospital's main building by means of an ingenious passage, it serves to treat walk-in patients. Its flexible structure allows adaptions to suit also future needs of KSSG. The interior design is based on materials and features intended also for the other new buildings still to come. Text in English and German.

This comprehensive biography traces the life and works of Robert Maillart, one of the most important engineers and designers of the twentieth century. His career developed around a central issue of modern technological society: the debate between two antithetical views of engineering opposing applied science, which relied on general mathematical theories for understanding structures against design, which Maillart championed. Maillart considered structures not merely works of utility but also as works of art. As utilitarian objects, he created a series of innovations of lasting significance. Aesthetically, Maillart shaped his three innovations in concrete to create surprising and often stunning new forms. Providing an analysis of these innovations, this biography also connects Maillart's aesthetic ideas with the private and professional context in which he worked.

A life story told in discrete, arresting snapshots of despair, resilience, creativity, and hope, Joe Andoe's literary portrait of his time to date on earth is as powerful as a heavyweight's hook and as spellbinding as a major crack-up on the opposite side of the highway. It is a testament to a young man's fortitude and genius and luck that enabled him to survive a life lived wildly out of control; a rocket ride from the sordid depths of self-destruction to the glorious pinnacles of . . . "Jubilee City."

This is a scholarly examination of the theoretical work of one of the most important architects of early modern Europe. Trained as a scientist, Wren applied the seventeenth-century scientific methods to his study of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and contemporary architecture. From his study of ancient buildings, he posited a new version of the origins and development of the Classical style, thereby becoming one of the first to challenge theoretical principles of architecture that had been upheld since the Renaissance. Rejecting the idea of beauty as absolute and innate, Wren formulated an empirical definition, based on visual perception and custom. His acceptance of the relativity of beauty also led him to recognize the Gothic style, then disparaged by himself and his contemporaries throughout Europe, as a legitimate one that evolved within particular cultural circumstances. This edition of Wren's writings includes accurate, annotated transcriptions of the texts.

Russel and Mary Wright: Dragon Rock at Manitoga, explores the home and woodland paths imagined by Russel and Mary Wright in Hudson Valley New York; a modernist haven that allows for ambiguity, and the natural world where the spirit could flourish. In the era of TV dinners and suburban conformity, Russel and Mary Wright were individualists. The Wrights rejected rigid modernism that did not allow for ambiguity, let alone the natural world. Here we find multiple binary factors: New York City and the sublime Hudson Valley landscape, commercial mass production and handmade nuance, Japanese aesthetics and American ideals, queer attraction, and family yearnings. Wright: Dragon Rock at Manitoga traces a journey, beyond an exploration of space, but a way of life, the story of the creation of a haven where the spirit could flourish. Our understanding of the Wrights's architectural, design, and environmental achievements, synthesizes four archives, including the estate of the Wright family, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Russel Wright Design Center at Manitoga, and the Russel Wright Papers at Syracuse University. With a clarion voice, we examine this partnership, revealing new understandings and cultural relevance.

News on Ludwig Hilberseimer! Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885-1967) is regarded as one of the leading theorists of the Neues Bauen movement in pre-War Germany, and of modern, functional urbanism. This set of accomplishments still dominates the public image of the architect, urban planner, teacher and art critic to this day. His development beyond that period has long been neglected. The essays in this collection seek to fill this gap, offering an exciting and wide-ranging new perspective on the work of a central protagonist of modernism. Until now, most critical studies of Hilberseimer's work came from his place of exile in Chicago and his work in Germany/Europe and the USA tended to be viewed separately; this volume is the first to attempt to end this separation and encourage a complete overview of is work. Previously unknown archival discoveries With contributions by Alexander Eisenschmidt, Magdalena Droste, Christine Mengin, Philipp Oswalt, Robin Schuldenfrei, Charles Waldheim and others

Divided into three chapters, Houses in the City, Houses in the Country and Places People Go To, the book showcases some of MBA's most spectacular projects, showing site pictures before, during and after construction. Most architecture books gloss over the nightmare part of the build, but the authors are keen to explain exactly what to expect during the process. Scattered throughout the book are some of the inspirations for MBA's designs, things they like and items that inspire them. While much of their work is focused in Central London, MBA has undertaken commissions worldwide including France,Germany and Los Angeles. In particular, their work for the Soho House Group and their emphasis on recycling and the environment have been the hallmarks of their success. Whether their commissions are commercial, residential or charitable, country or town houses, hotels, restaurants or bars, MBA create spaces you really want to eat, live or stay in. A quirky sense of humour is always at play, infusing their work with an empathy and warmth that many architects in the same filed just miss. Theirs is a vibrant and very busy practice.

The Olympic Stadium in Montreal, the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris and the Officers Club in Abu Dhabi are just a few of Roger Taillibert's most iconic buildings. Here, Taillibert reminisces about his experiences, and the places and people that have influenced his work: Le Corbusier, Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright and (in particular) Alvar Aalto.

The objects of architecture are not simply inert assemblies of material-they are complex entities that unfold their potential agencies (whether political, social, or environmental) in equally complex ways. Exploring these forms of architectural agency has in recent years been a central aspect of the work of Andres Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation, who, in addition to their built works, pursue a research practice through the many other media of architectural production. Their projects are reactive, intervening on what already exists to demonstrate how design, politics, and criticality operate across different scales and at the intersection of multiple realities. Jaque's performances, videos, and installations-and this book, which collects a range of recent research projects-bring new subjects into the fold of architecture, focusing on alternative actors, distributions of power and representation, and the sociocultural effects of architecture. These episodes address ideas like genetic manipulation, the necessary requeering of dequeered spaces of online interaction, and the selling of modern architectural comforts in order to subvert the field from within and to contest capitalism's flattening-out of public life. Rather than propose alternative-from-scratch futuristic or idealized realities, Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation claim that reality is produced at the intersection of things like porn, interior design, maintenance, and the territorial distribution of toxicity. Documenting a series of performances, research projects, installations, films, characters, and exhibitions, Superpowers of Scale demonstrates the breadth of architectural knowledge and its possible representations.

In post-Depression America, Greyhound put adventure within the reach of all. Convinced that their terminals should project the glamour and excitement of travel, the company turned to an architect who could translate the sleek, streamlined Greyhound design into buildings that would both serve and delight the public. This volume explores the life of William Strudwick Arrasmith, a defining artist of the short-lived era of streamline design, and especially his work for Greyhound--at least fifty terminals and other facilities. The final third of the book is a detailed examination of 28 of these terminals. A full chronology of Arrasmith's firms and commissions is also included.

The World of Andre Le Notre Thierry Mariage. Translated by Graham Larkin "A stimulating effort to contextualize Le Notre's career and to relate the 'French formal garden' to the cultural and political environment of Louis XIV's reign."--"French History" "This ambitious book is intellectually significant, well researched, and cogently presented. . . . Excellent."--"Geographical Reviews" "A substantial contribution to the study of seventeenth-century French garden practice."--"Landscape Architecture" The gardens of Versailles--along with the name of their chief creator, Andre Le Notre (1613-1700)--have become synonymous with the French style of "formal" garden. This style in its turn would succumb to another "national" mode, the English school of naturalistic and picturesque landscapes. But as Thierry Mariage makes clear, the garden style that Le Notre brought to perfection need not be seen in opposition to the later "English" one. Rather, he claims, they represent two points along a continuum that exists between the natural and cultural worlds. Published originally in Belgium as "L'univers de Le Nostre," Mariage's examination of Le Notre moves beyond traditional art historical documentation and appreciation into a realm of interpretation. He situates Le Notre's garden art in a complex social and cultural world, where the practices of land management, surveying techniques and hydrology, military practice, and both scientific and literary perspectives on land use and experience brought into being a unique form of landscape architecture. His analysis opens up the fashion in which design techniques and garden philosophy are shaped by material culture. Thierry Mariage is Architect for National and Historical Monuments, in charge of Versailles Museum, Park, and Gardens. Graham Larkin is Curator of European and American Art at the National Gallery of Canada. Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture 1998 168 pages 7 x 10 38 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-2136-7 Paper $26.50s 17.50 World Rights Architecture Short copy: Mariage's examination of Andre Le Notre moves beyond traditional art historical documentation and appreciation into a realm of interpretation. He situates Le Notre garden art in a complex social and cultural world.

A comprehensive book on Selldorf Architects, with a detailed look at the museums, residences, and public buildings the firm has designed in the United States and abroad. Founding principal Annabelle Selldorf was born in Cologne, Germany and educated at the Pratt Institute and Syracuse University. The firm launched into international prominence with the opening of New York's Neue Galerie in 2001. Since, Selldorf Architects has become known for galleries, cultural projects, and as well as private homes. More recently, the firm has made its mark with Sims Municipal Recycling in Brooklyn in 2013. The design and construction won an Award for Excellence in Design from the Public Design Commission. In 2014, Selldorf Architects received the commission to build the expansion of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. This book begins with an extensive conversation between Tom Eccles and Annabelle Selldorf, as well as an essay by architecture critic Ian Volner. A newly-shot, full color portfolio by renowned photographer Todd Eberle is complimented by an in-depth look at the story behind 30 selected projects, including architectural plans and sketches.

In 1956, TIME magazine called him one of the defining "form-givers of the 20th century." Today, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) remains a locus classicus of modernism for architects and designers alike. As a Bauhaus pioneer, even his earliest work was marked by a material restraint; the balance of texture, color, and shape; and a symbiosis of local and global, big and small, rough and smooth. In this essential introductory monograph, we survey Breuer's complete career through some of his most influential projects and ideas, from his landmark tubular furniture to the MoMA Research House to his innovation of "binuclear" housing, splitting living and sleeping areas into separate wings. Along the way, we follow Hungarian-born Breuer's journey to international acclaim, with featured projects from Germany, France, England, Switzerland, and across the United States contributing to his global status as a modernist maestro. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts, and plans)

The shopping mall is both the most visible and the most contentious symbol of American prosperity. Despite their convenience, malls are routinely criticized for representing much that is wrong in America--sprawl, conspicuous consumption, the loss of regional character, and the decline of Mom and Pop stores. So ubiquitous are malls that most people would be suprised to learn that they are the brainchild of a single person, architect Victor Gruen.An immigrant from Austria who fled the Nazis in 1938, Gruen based his idea for the mall on an idealized America: the dream of concentrated shops that would benefit the businessperson as well as the consumer and that would foster a sense of shared community. Modernist Philip Johnson applauded Gruen for creating a true civic art and architecture that enriched Americans' daily lives, and for decades he received praise from luminaries such as Lewis Mumford, Winthrop Rockefeller, and Lady Bird Johnson. Yet, in the end, Gruen returned to Europe, thoroughly disillusioned with his American dream.In "Mall Maker," the first biography of this visionary spirit, M. Jeffrey Hardwick relates Gruen's successes and failures--his work at the 1939 World's Fair, his makeover of New York's Fifth Avenue boutiques, his rejected plans for reworking entire communities, such as Fort Worth, Texas, and his crowning achievement, the enclosed shopping mall. Throughout Hardwick illuminates the dramatic shifts in American culture during the mid-twentieth century, notably the rise of suburbia and automobiles, the death of downtown, and the effect these changes had on American life. Gruen championed the redesign of suburbs and cities through giant shopping malls, earnestly believing that he was promoting an American ideal, the ability to build a community. Yet, as malls began covering the landscape and downtowns became more depressed, Gruen became painfully aware that his dream of overcoming social problems through architecture and commerce was slipping away. By the tumultuous year of 1968, it had disappeared.Victor Gruen made America depend upon its shopping malls. While they did not provide an invigorated sense of community as he had hoped, they are enduring monuments to the lure of consumer culture.

"This is a tale of murdered prostitutes and exhumed nuns, of still-born babies and live chickens cast in plaster, of patches of skin removed without anaesthetic from young men, of cholera, alcoholism, riot arson and death-by-tram, at the centre of which there is a celibate, vegetarian, devout man who liked lettuce dipped in milk for lunch…
'Evening Standard'

For many Gaudi's unique architecture 'is' Barcelona. But little is known about the shadowy figure behind the swirling, vivid buildings that inspired the surrealists. Contemporary accounts describe an effete dandy who dressed like a tramp, a revolutionary patriot arrested in a pro-Catalan riot dressed like a tramp age 73, and a hermit who chose lifelong celibacy, rejected by the woman he loved. This masterly biography is the first to untangle his paradoxes, bringing the obsessions of both man and architect powerfully to life, against the changing backdrop of Catalonia.

"A terrifically stirring biography…van Hensbergen animates ideas with narrative drive. Buildings are his characters."
'New York Times'

"'Gaudi' brings vividly alive for the first time the Catalan cultural and political background that is the key to understanding Gaudi"
'Sunday Telegraph'

"The most definitive work on the architect"
'Art Review'

"A soaring biography, meticulously researched, elegantly organised, fluidly and lucidly written"
'Chicago Tribune'

"At the end [of reading 'Gaudi' I felt like jumping on a jet to Barcelona, imagination at full stretch, rosary in hand"
'Guardian'

A brilliantly conceived biography of Joseph Paxton, horticulturist to the Duke & Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth, architect of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and one of the greatest unsung heroes of the Victorian Age In the nineteenth century, which witnessed a revolution in horticulture and urban planning and architecture, Joseph Paxton, a man with no formal education, strode like a colossus. Head gardener at Chatsworth by the age of twenty-three, and encouraged by the sixth Duke of Devonshire whose patronage soon flourished into the defining friendship of his life, Paxton set about transforming this Derbyshire estate into the greatest garden in England. Visitors there were astonished by the enormous glasshouses and ambitious waterworks he built, the collection of orchids, the largest in all England, the dwarf bananas and the gargantuan lily, the trees and plants brought back from all over the world. Queen Victoria came to marvel and, increasingly, with the development of the railway in which Paxton was also involved, daytrippers from all over the country. It was the Crystal Palace, home of the Great Exhibition in 1851, that secured Paxton's fame. His design, initially doodled on a piece of blotting paper, was the architectural triumph of its time. Two thousand men worked for eight months to complete it. It was six times the size of St Paul's Cathedral, enclosed a space of 18 acres, and entertained six million visitors. By the time of his death fourteen years later, 'the busiest man in England' according to Dickens, was friends with Brunel and Stevenson and in constant demand to design public parks and gardens. His last, seemingly most eccentric project was for a Great Boulevard under glass, a crystal arcade that would connect all the main railway termini in London. Drawing on exclusive access to Paxton's personal letters, Kate Colquhouns's remarkable biography is a compelling story of a man who typifies the Victorian ideal of self-improvement and a touching portrait of one of that era's great heroes.

A serious scholarly look at the work of R. Buckminster Fuller is long overdue. While Fuller himself wrote and published many volumes, and several biographies were written about him, there is little research that contributes to a critical understanding of his work and its historical significance. The 1,300-plus linear feet of material contained in the Fuller Archive at Stanford, including papers, photographs, audio and video recordings, and models, has been recently organized and described by the Department of Special Collections, and is ready to be explored by a new generation of scholars.
Fuller's work has often suffered from lopsided treatment. Some laud him as a planetary prophet whose design science work foretold sustainable architecture and nanotechnology; others dismiss him as a "delirious technician" with a talent for linguistic obfuscation. Between adulation and disdain must lie a balanced picture of Fuller's life and his work.
This volume paints that picture by taking a broader historical view, discussing Fuller and his work in the context of larger social and cultural patterns. Fuller is a common thread in a critical cultural history that will show him to be both a participant in and a product of his times. By placing Fuller and his work in a historical framework, we will arrive at a much richer understanding of both this self-made polymath and his times. This fresh, contextual look at Fuller's work from leading scholars in different fields is an important step toward filling the void of serious scholarship on Fuller.

A serious scholarly look at the work of R. Buckminster Fuller is long overdue. While Fuller himself wrote and published many volumes, and several biographies were written about him, there is little research that contributes to a critical understanding of his work and its historical significance. The 1,300-plus linear feet of material contained in the Fuller Archive at Stanford, including papers, photographs, audio and video recordings, and models, has been recently organized and described by the Department of Special Collections, and is ready to be explored by a new generation of scholars.
Fuller's work has often suffered from lopsided treatment. Some laud him as a planetary prophet whose design science work foretold sustainable architecture and nanotechnology; others dismiss him as a "delirious technician" with a talent for linguistic obfuscation. Between adulation and disdain must lie a balanced picture of Fuller's life and his work.
This volume paints that picture by taking a broader historical view, discussing Fuller and his work in the context of larger social and cultural patterns. Fuller is a common thread in a critical cultural history that will show him to be both a participant in and a product of his times. By placing Fuller and his work in a historical framework, we will arrive at a much richer understanding of both this self-made polymath and his times. This fresh, contextual look at Fuller's work from leading scholars in different fields is an important step toward filling the void of serious scholarship on Fuller.